Of Midnight Born

by Lisa Cach

  “Not ransom in the way you think,” Thomas said. “We do not want your gold.”

  That caught him up short. “Christ’s curse, what else could you want?”

  “My sister needs a husband. I have decided upon you.”

  “What?” le Gayne exclaimed, his eyes going to Serena. Then he started to laugh. He fell back from the door, his voice moving farther away as he stumbled about the room in the dark, howling with laughter.

  His mirth cut through to her bones, settling deep. She could remain standing there only by clinging tight to her will and to her anger. It didn’t matter what this donkey’s ass thought of her, she told herself harshly. She was not in search of his affections. She would have her revenge on him for this humiliation when he was forced to accede to their wishes.

  When the laughter had died down to intermittent giggles—creepy and repulsive, coming from such a large man—Thomas spoke again.

  “You will have neither food nor water until you have agreed.”

  “What?” le Gayne said angrily, his giggles stopping. “I will be of no use to you if I die!”

  “You are of no use to us alive and unwilling, either,” Thomas said. “’Twould be safer to have you dead than to set you free at this point.”

  “’Tis a fool’s plan! You will gain nothing from it!”

  “Perhaps not,” Thomas said, and began to lead Serena away, carrying the torch and leaving le Gayne in darkness. “But be assured that all you shall gain from refusal is a slow and painful death.”

  Serena sat on the floor of the bedchamber, going through her chest of treasures. There were not many.

  There was an ivory comb, several of its teeth broken, with a mermaid carved upon it. There was a small silver mirror, tarnished now, reflecting nothing. She lifted out the gold links of a girdle, finding the place on the medallion at the end of the chain belt where she had put her teeth marks in the soft gold as a baby. Any of the three items could have been sold, but for her doing that would have been worse than selling the land.

  These three things, and a white and gold sleeveless surcoat, were all she had left of her mother. Her memories were almost as sparse: a bee sting that her mother had soothed; being held on Lady Clerenbold’s lap while she talked to one of the serving women; her face illuminated by a candle after she had tucked Serena in for the night; and, near the end, seeing her pale and weak against her pillow, after Thomas was born. She had died within the year, never having recovered her strength from the complicated birth.

  Serena remembered as well the love she had felt for her mother, the warm sense that all was well when the woman was present. She wanted to re-create that with her own children. She missed the softness that had gone so early from her life.

  She doubted she could ever become a graceful lady, pious and soft-spoken, her fingers skilled with a needle and her hands at healing: she was too well used to the ways of men for that. She knew she had it in her, though, to be a loving mother. She loved Thomas, for all that they were constantly at each other’s throats, and she would love her children. There was nothing more she would ask from life than the chance to do that, and to remain free from hunger.

  “Serena?” Thomas interrupted her thoughts from the doorway.

  “Yes?” she said, turning from her seat on the floor, the white silk surcoat spread over her lap. Her brother had been down to see le Gayne on this, the man’s fifth day of captivity.

  “He has agreed.”

  She closed her eyes and gave thanks to God.

  Chapter Three

  Le Gayne’s Fortress

  1809

  “This is the haunted castle?” ten-year-old Alex asked in disgust, still panting from the long climb up the hill.

  His cousin Rhys looked affronted, the locks around his own face damp with sweat. “What were you expecting? I told you it was a ruin.”

  Alex dropped down onto the springy turf, shaking his head at the sight before him. Random stones were scattered over the hilltop, innocent and bland in the cheery June sunlight. Rabbits grazed among the low grasses and wildflowers, and blue butterflies danced in the warm golden air. A few eroded, low walls gave hints of the fortress that had once stood here, protector and oppressor of the farmlands below, but there was nothing left to impress a boy who had been expecting towers and torture chambers.

  “It’s nothing but a pile of rocks.”

  “Don’t let the ghost hear you say that.”

  Alex made a rude sound. “There’s no such thing as ghosts.”

  “We’ll see how brave you are when it gets dark, city boy,” Rhys taunted.

  “London at night is more dangerous than your stupid ruins will ever be.”

  Rhys threw a rock at him, hitting him on the shoulder. Alex scrambled up and tackled him, setting off a scuffle that left Alex with a fat lip and Rhys’s shirt torn. Honor satisfied, they set about exploring the ruins, looking for remnants of armor, swords, and battle-axes. As they scrounged about, Alex slowly wandered away from Rhys, his mind lost in thoughts of knights and battles.

  A black-and-white bird standing on a rock made a harsh weet-chak-chak, and small bees buzzed among yellow and pink flowers. A grasshopper leaped away as Alex poked at the ground with his stick, seeking the clank of metal. The sun, hot on his neck and shoulders, felt as if it were seeping through the fabric of his shirt, baking his skin. He paused in his search a moment, standing straight to see where Rhys was.

  His cousin was nowhere in sight, and as Alex looked around he saw that he had wandered into what might once have been the kitchen garden. It was a walled area, and made up one end of the U-shaped castle foundations. Like most boys his age, he could never get enough of reading about castles, and his schoolmaster had taught him a good deal about the history of the structures.

  The garden was a mass of wildflowers and small shrubs, its grasses buzzing with insects. A small snake sunned itself atop the wall, waking and slithering quickly into a crack when his approach disturbed it. The garden was bare of trees except for one, an old monster with a massive trunk several feet around.

  Alex squinted through the sunlight at the tree, its branches sparse, thick, and stunted, as if they had been broken off in storms. It looked ancient, as old as the ruins themselves. It had gray-white bark, with rough horizontal ridges where it was not split and breaking away in black wounds or covered in pale lichens. The bark looked like that of the cherry tree he had sat in yesterday with Rhys, gorging on ripe fruit until he was ill. Only this tree was still in blossom and without leaves, whereas those in the orchard were already bearing fruit.

  The blossoms didn’t look quite like anything he’d ever seen. They were vivid pink, with dozens of petals on each flower. He continued to stare at the tree, which was massive and rough, blooming out of season with its profusion of feathery pink blossoms, and an eerie sense of the tree’s wrongness began to creep up his spine.

  The hum of the insects grew louder in his ears, and in their chattering he imagined he could hear another voice, softer, female, calling to him.

  Alex, she called. Alex…

  His body trembled, his legs going weak. He wanted to run, but could not move. It was as if some silvery energy ran through his nerves, turning his muscles to jelly.

  “Alex!” Rhys shouted from somewhere behind him. “Where are you?”

  The sound of his cousin’s voice, impatient and real, broke the spell. “Here!” he called, and backed away from the tree. “Coming!” He was unwilling to turn his back on the cherry tree, possessed by the certainty that it was somehow aware of his presence: that there was some alien sentience living within it.

  When he was a safe distance away, he turned and ran.

  They built their campfire in the shelter of one of the low walls, and as the sun set they sat around it, devouring the supper that Rhys’s mother had packed, both of them as hungry and well mannered as a pair of wolves.

  Alex knew his mother and elder sisters would throw a fit if they saw him gnawing on
a slice of roast beef bare-handed, as he did now. He growled in low pleasure, ripping at the meat—imagining it was a leg of boar, imagining Philippa, Amelia, and Constance having a fit of the vapors, moaning and fanning themselves, waving a burned feather under each other’s noses at his display of barbaric manners, all the while bewailing their fate at having been given a brother to endure. Mother would look on, helpless and disapproving.

  The food was well finished by the time full dark fell upon them, late in coming at this time of year. As weariness crept up on them they grew chilled, and they crawled into their blankets, lying at right angles to each other, nearly head-to-head around the fire. They said little, staring into the flames and occasionally throwing a stick into the pit or poking at the embers. Eventually even that grew to be too much effort, and Alex drew his hands into the warmth of the blanket.

  It was the first time he had camped out-of-doors, and he felt his senses expanding into the night around him, hearing the crackle of the fire, the breeze around the low walls, and the night insects buzzing faintly. A sense of his own vulnerability slowly began to tingle over his skin as he lay exposed on the ground, without the shelter of walls or roof.

  “Her name is Serena,” Rhys said into the quiet.

  “Who?” Alex asked, his half-mast eyes opening full again.

  “The ghost.”

  Alex gave a loud, disparaging sigh, but felt a shiver along the back of his neck. “And when the moon is full you can hear her weeping for her lost love,” he mocked. “It’s the same story everywhere.”

  “Serena is not that type of ghost. She is a murderess,” Rhys said, his voice low and ominous.

  Alex tucked the blanket more tightly under his neck, his hands fisted in the wool. “Oh? And whom, pray tell, did she murder?”

  “Her husband, upon their wedding night, in their bed while he slept. He was in love with her, wildly so, even though she had professed a great hatred for men and vowed to become a nun.”

  “Then why did she marry him?” Alex asked.

  “It was her brother who forced her to marry. Except for her brother, the entire family had been wiped out by the Black Death, and they were desperate for money. When Hugh offered for her, the brother agreed. The brother beat Serena into submission, and, helpless to do otherwise, she married Hugh, swearing revenge on them both all the while.”

  “She could have run away,” Alex said.

  “To where? And that would not have been good enough for Serena. Like I said, she wanted revenge. The final straw was what Hugh did to her under the bedcovers on their wedding night. When he was finished, and slept in blissful satisfaction, she took her dagger and stabbed him through the heart.”

  Alex craned his neck to see his cousin’s face. “What did he do to her…under the covers?”

  “Some say he did something unnatural. Others that it was only what a maid should have expected.”

  Alex frowned. But what was that, exactly?

  “The next morning,” Rhys continued, “when a serving wench came in with their morning meal, she found Serena covered in blood, laughing. The girl screamed, and Serena ran past her, darting from the room, her naked body red with her husband’s blood. She tripped at the top of the stone stairs to the great hall, and tumbled down them, breaking her neck and half the bones in her body, her crumpled body finally coming to rest on the floor of the hall.”

  Alex flicked his eyes to the remnants of a stone staircase, not four feet from where he lay. He inched closer to the dying fire.

  “The castle has been haunted by her crazed spirit ever since. She will not harm a woman, but any boy or man who ventures onto the grounds at night had best fear for his life. ’Tis why the place came to be called Maiden Castle.”

  Alex stared wide-eyed at his cousin for several long moments, until it occurred to him that if Serena was so dangerous, Rhys would not be lying so calmly in his blanket across the fire. He forced a laugh. “That’s a clever story. Did you make it up as you went along?”

  “It’s God’s own truth, and it’s why I’m wearing this for protection,” Rhys said, pulling on the chain around his neck until a silver crucifix emerged from his blanket. “My sister’s nurse is Catholic, and she gave it to me after hearing where we would be spending the night.”

  Alex’s eyebrows went up in concern, and he chewed his lip. He had no such talisman, coming from a family that only went through the motions of religion. “There’s no such thing as ghosts,” he said.

  Rhys smiled, and tucked the crucifix back into his shirt. “Sleep well, city boy.” He made a show of flopping about, getting comfortable, then gave a loud sigh of contentment and closed his eyes.

  “There’s no such thing as ghosts,” Alex repeated in a whisper. He closed his eyes, shutting out the shadows of the castle walls, and the staircase so near. In his mind the lumps of ground beneath him slowly became the crumpled body of Serena, her broken limbs jutting against his own small frame, the cold earth her own cold, dead flesh. He could hear her calling him, a breathy whisper on the night air, calling like the voice from the cherry tree, Alllll-exxxx…

  His eyes flew open. The fire was but burning coals now, and he could hear his cousin’s relaxed breathing. Rhys was truly asleep. His cousin’s blithe ease at sleeping in the ruins of a haunted castle, protective crucifix or no, reawakened Alex’s suspicions. He narrowed his eyes at this country relative who had already tricked him into trying to milk a bull—he’d been lucky not to get his skull kicked in—and who had persuaded him to wade in stagnant water infested with leeches. And an encounter with a patch of stinging nettles had led to a serious fistfight.

  This time when he closed his eyes, he kept away the images of broken bones. Instead he drifted off to sleep imagining the grand revenge to be had if Rhys ever came to visit London. It would be a wonderful thing if he could be knocked into the filthy Thames.

  When Alex awoke again it was to chilled darkness, and he did not know for a moment where he was or what had stirred him. A streak of light, present but for an instant, flashed by the corner of his eye. He turned his head, then rolled onto his back as another streak, then another flashed across the deep blue-black sky above.

  His lips parted, and his eyes widened in amazement. Streak after streak—five, ten, twenty at a time—burned their way across the heavens, their white light illuminating the castle ruins like silent fireworks.

  “Rhys!” he whispered, not turning to look at his cousin, unwilling to take his eyes off the miracle above. “Rhys! Wake up!”

  Not waiting for a response, he stood and stumbled his way to the remnant of stairs, climbing them up onto the tallest fragment of wall, where he stood atop the uneven stones. It was the highest point of the ruins, above even the tops of the trees that crept up the flanks of the mountain. He tilted back his head and took in the blue-black sky.

  Stars fells down by the hundreds in a cloudburst shower of light, illuminating the mountaintop and the valley below.

  Another glow of light, larger than the stars, closer, brought his gaze back down. He caught a quick impression of long pale hair floating in the breeze, a white hand reaching toward him, and a glowing face with eyes like empty wells, black with pain. Startled, he lost his balance, the stars above briefly filling his gaze once more as he fell through empty air.

  He hit stone, and then there was nothing.

  Chapter Four

  Maiden Castle

  August, 1832

  “Serena must be rubbing her ghostly hands in anticipation,” Rhys said.

  Alex’s index finger lightly touched his temple, and the streak of white in his midnight black hair. The scar from where his head had struck one of the stone stairs twenty-odd years ago was hidden there, at the edge of his hairline. “Sometimes I almost think you believe that story.”

  “I didn’t, you know. Not until I woke up that morning and found you with your skull cracked and a broken arm. It’s a miracle you ever got off this hill alive. It’s beyond me why you would cho
ose to live here now.”

  Alex sat atop one of the crenelated parapets of the tower of the rebuilt castle, oblivious to the sheer, hundred-foot drop at his back. He could see for miles, over downs and small pockets of woodland, sheep-dotted fields and hedgerows, the river and the gray village of Bradford-on-Avon, which nestled along its bank. And he could see the sky, all of it, a glorious blue dome stretching from horizon to horizon and into the endless realms of space beyond.

  A breeze through his hair drew him back to earth, and he smiled at his cousin. “You still think it was Serena who pushed me from that wall.”

  “It makes no sense to me how even an ignorant child of the city like you could have come to such grief without help.”

  “Ah, but the wonder of the stars…” Alex said, sweeping his hand above him at the sunlit heavens.

  Rhys snorted rudely. “There’s not a romantic, fanciful bone in your body.”

  “Why, darling, what an unfair statement to make,” Beth Cox said, her bonneted head appearing above the trapdoor of the tower. Rhys went to assist his wife up the final steep steps, grasping her hand and pulling her up. “Whoop!” Beth gasped as she found herself suddenly standing, her fluffy skirts billowing in the breeze. “Oh, good gracious,” she said, taking in the view.

  Alex watched as Rhys put his arm around his wife, steadying her. It reminded him that he’d had that once, that closeness with a woman, ripe with the hopes of family and a long life. Death had taken it from him with the hot touch of a fever, sweeping pretty, petite Frances away as if she were so much dust. Sometimes it felt as though every step he had made since that day was a step away from the possibility of ever having such a life again, and having to risk the pain of loss.

  “I don’t see what was unfair about it,” Rhys was saying to his wife. “The man would rather spend his nights with a telescope than a woman.”